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Originally Posted by Yahwe
surely it's a justification of patents because instead of trying to think back to the first time you saw a feature you can simply pop down to your local patent office and find out who first registered it.
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In this case, not really. Nintendo hold (or held, presumably it's expired now) the patent on the D-Pad, but the basic idea was present in an earlier controller. And I don't think anyone holds a patent on the analog stick anyway.
These ideas are all quite similar to each other, and who holds the patent doesn't tell us much (partially because the USPTO don't seem to actually do their job particularly well in some cases, and partially because the ideas are actually very nuanced and one idea blends into another). Microsoft hold some sort of patent on "launching an application on a PDA using a double cllick" or something like that, but it's not like they pioneered the double click.